Menka Goyal

Menka Goyal is Girish Goyal’s wife and Shivam Goyal’s mother, but her presence in the story is defined most powerfully by her absence: after a short circuit at one of the Goyal family’s projects in Gurgaon, she falls into a coma and remains unreachable while the family reorganizes its emotional life around the disaster. Her condition, together with Mohini Bhattacharya’s death, becomes the paired catastrophe that devastates Shivam Goyal and Girish Goyal and transforms their relationship from intimate family solidarity into guarded conflict.

Identity and Family Place

Menka is established through the Goyal family’s domestic and emotional structure rather than through an extended independent storyline. She is Girish’s wife and Shivam’s mother, and her role in Shivam’s memories is that of a physically affectionate parent who notices his disappointments and tries to protect him from the family’s rules. A remembered scene shows her brushing the fourteen-year-old Shivam’s hair and explaining that the household could not hold a party that year because a family member had died. She promises him a grander celebration when he turns fifteen, making her both the voice of family custom and the person who softens that custom with tenderness.

That memory gives Menka a concrete maternal presence. Shivam does not want an extravagant celebration so much as a day when his father will make time for him and the whole family will be together. Menka understands the emotional need beneath the request, even though she cannot overturn the Goyal family’s year-long mourning custom. Her promise of a future celebration therefore becomes painfully ironic: the family’s next great rupture is not another ordinary bereavement but the accident that leaves her alive yet inaccessible.

Accident and Comatose Condition

The decisive event in Menka’s biography is the short circuit at a new Goyal project in Gurgaon. The accident leaves her in a comatose condition, and the family continues to live with the uncertainty of waiting for recovery rather than the finality of a confirmed death. In a later conversation, Shivam describes the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as the period when tragedy struck the family through freak, unexpected accidents. He identifies the Gurgaon short circuit as the cause of his mother’s coma and places it alongside another fire accident and Mohini’s death within the same devastating period.

Menka’s coma alters the family’s experience of time. Her condition is neither resolved nor emotionally distant; it remains a continuing medical crisis that keeps hope alive while preventing closure. Shivam tells Rati Goyal that the family has placed its hopes on Dr. Henry Oliver’s expected visit to Delhi in the coming months, showing that medical intervention is still imagined as a possible turning point. The search for treatment also reveals how the family translates grief into anticipation, waiting for an expert’s arrival because waiting is the only form of action still available to them.

Effects on Shivam and Girish

Menka’s coma and Mohini’s death occur within six months of each other and devastate both Shivam and Girish. Instead of emotionally opening up or consoling each other, father and son plunge into work. Business becomes their sanctuary, and competition over tasks provides a disciplined substitute for mourning. Their productivity does not heal the loss; it gives their grief a socially acceptable surface while leaving the pain unspoken beneath it.

That silence gradually becomes antagonism. Shivam explains that he and Girish begin picking fights, opposing one another’s ideas, and cutting down each other’s proposals, sometimes for no reason beyond the pressure they are carrying. Menka’s coma is therefore not merely a family tragedy in the background. It is one of the forces that redirects grief into a destructive father-son pattern. Their inability to name their shared pain makes ordinary professional disagreement carry the weight of personal injury.

The damage is visible in a business meeting when Alex D Costa makes a pointed remark about couples whose business partnerships strengthen their marriages and invokes Girish and Menka as a shining example. He immediately recognizes that he has touched a painful subject. The room falls silent; Girish clenches his jaw and avoids eye contact, while the memory of Menka’s condition and Mohini’s death stands between the participants like an invisible barrier. Girish then resumes the investment discussion with professional authority, but his steady voice retains sadness. His attempt to return to business does not erase the wound; it dramatizes the family’s habitual method of containing it.

Relationships and Emotional Legacy

Menka’s relationship with Shivam is remembered through care, physical closeness, and an effort to preserve his sense of belonging. Her gesture of brushing his hair and her promise of a future birthday party contrast with the later emotional deprivation caused by her coma. Shivam’s grief is intensified because the mother who once mediated family disappointment can no longer speak, reassure him, or participate in the family’s attempts to recover.

Rati’s conversations with Shivam show how Menka’s condition remains a recurring concern among the family’s older generation. When Rati asks whether there has been any improvement, Shivam answers that there has been none and refers to the hoped-for medical visit. The question is brief, but its repetition shows that Menka’s coma continues to organize family conversations even when the immediate subject is Shivam’s grief over Mohini or the danger posed by Sherlie D Costa’s obsession.

Menka’s absence also becomes part of the family’s moral landscape. Rati criticizes Alex D Costa’s lack of ethics and says that Girish should have kept him away from the beginning, while Shivam credits his father with never allowing Alex to cross the line. These judgments occur in a family already strained by Menka’s illness and Mohini’s death. The coma makes the cost of compromised trust more severe: every business decision is made by people whose private lives have already been broken by events that began within or around their professional world.

Narrative Significance and Ending

Menka has no recovered voice or independent resolution in the supplied narrative. Her ending remains an unresolved comatose condition, with the family still waiting for possible medical improvement. That lack of closure is structurally important. Mohini Bhattacharya’s death produces a fixed grief, while Menka’s coma produces suspended grief: Girish and Shivam must mourn and hope at the same time, and Shivam must continue living with the possibility that his mother may return without any assurance that she will.

The contrast between Menka’s earlier domestic warmth and her later inaccessible body exposes the cost of the Goyal family’s emotional avoidance. The family’s mourning custom once delayed celebration for a year after a death, but Menka’s coma creates a more complicated suspension in which celebration, reconciliation, and ordinary family intimacy remain shadowed by an event that has never fully ended. Her condition helps explain why Shivam and Girish retreat into business, why their relationship becomes bitter, and why later moments of healing matter so much: recovery must include not only a medical hope for Menka, but also the restoration of emotional communication among the people who remain beside her.